Blind cave-dwelling fish also hard of hearing

Sound detection worse in animals living in the dark than in their surface-living cousins

Blind fish that spend their lives in dark, underwater caves have lost a huge chunk of their ability to hear, scientists report in the March 27 Biology Letters. Two of the fish species studied could not hear high-pitched sounds.

“I was really surprised,” says study coauthor Daphne Soares of the University of Maryland, College Park. “I expected them to hear much better than the surface fishes.”

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